“Amazon.com has pulled books from Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the United States, in a dispute over the pricing on e-books on the site,” Brad Stone and Motoko Rich report for The New York Times. “The publisher’s books can be purchased only from third parties on Amazon.com.”
“Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of e-books to around $15 from $9.99,” Stone and Rich report. “Macmillan is one of the publishers signed on to offer books to Apple, as part of its new iBookstore on the iPad tablet unveiled earlier this week.”
“Macmillan is one of the publishers signed on to offer books to Apple, as part of its new iBookstore on the iPad tablet unveiled earlier this week,” Stone and Rich report. “Apple will allow publishers more leeway to set their own prices for e-books. Although the prices will be tethered to print book prices by a formula that will generally yield prices between $12.99 and $14.99 for most fiction and general nonfiction, that is significantly higher than $9.99 discount that Amazon offers on its Kindle.”
MacDailyNews Note: Apple’s iBookstore will be available when the first iPads hit the U.S. in late March.
Stone and Rich continue, “Publishers have been concerned that such pricing devalues books. Tensions between publishers and Amazon have been rising as publishers have withheld select e-book editions for several months after the release of hardcover versions of books. It is not clear yet if publishers can withhold books from Amazon while giving them to other parties like Apple. Antitrust lawyers said it could raise legal issues.”
MacDailyNews Take: The paradigm has shifted, Jeff. Try this on for size: Apple’s iBookstore, The Earth’s Biggest Selection of Books.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers "Fred Mertz" and "James W." for the heads up.]
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